"What's it about?"
Gus thought about it. A sprinkler head ticked somewhere down the block.
"Some people, they get a little bit of power, and it's like giving a kid a hammer," he said. "Everything starts to look like a nail. Darlene got this neighborhood as a hammer about eight years ago. You're just the newest nail. You stood up at that meeting and made her look silly in front of forty people. And then you went and grew a wall in front of her sunset." He shrugged. "She's not going to forgive the sunset."
"It's coming down in October."
"Doesn't matter," Gus said. "She's already decided what it is."
* * *
My other ally that summer was fourteen years old and had a tongue like a filleting knife.
Lucía Delgado lived in the house downhill from me with her mother, Marisol, an emergency room nurse at St. Al's, and her father, Hector, who drove a delivery truck for a beverage distributor and was gone before dawn most days. Lucía had leaned over our shared fence in June and asked what the "giant weird plants" were. Within a week she was in my garage two afternoons a week, wearing my spare rubber apron. She was pulling sheets from the vat with a mould and deckle I'd made for her out of cedar and window screen, and she was better at it than I'd been after a year.
She was also on the Larkspur Commons Facebook group, which I wasn't, because I'm thirty-nine and have a healthy fear of neighborhood Facebook groups. She came into my garage one Thursday in mid-August, already talking.
"Okay, so, the Measuring Lady posted about you," she said.
That was what Lucía called Darlene. She had seen her with the pole.
"Posted what?"